Giveaway: Office 365 Home Premium

You may recall that last month, I went to Seattle to hang out with Microsoft for a few days.

(Life is hard, I know.)

For someone who spends their whole life online, it’d probably surprise many how much of a digital mess I actually am. I often don’t sort things — including very important things I should, like files related to research, photos, and voice notes — and that makes my work loads harder than it actually has to be.

And so, with spring cleaning time here — at least, people tell me that — my apartment still resembles a Hazmat fiasco gone wrong — and I wonder if, in the absence of cleaning out my cabinets, I should be organizing my digital life?

Office 365 is letting me give away to one of you a 1-year subscription to Office 365 Home Premium — so you can get organized yourself! — and in the meantime, I’m using that as a jumping point to figure out where the heck to go with my own life.

And that one license I’m giving away? It’s even better than you may think because you can use one license for an entire household on up to five devices – this will also give you access to SkyDrive , where you can save all your important documents to grab them on-the-go. Traveling to the Middle East and have an emergency where you need to edit an assignment you submitted 3 weeks ago immediately but the computer you completed it on is back home in New York? (Believe it or not, this happened to me.) With SkyDrive you can just pop in and grab your document from anywhere.

Office 365 Home Premium includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access and one license for the entire household to use Office on up to five devices, including Windows tablets, PCs or Macs, and get Office on Demand from any Internet-connected PC. In addition, you’ll score SkyDrive storage, Skype minutes, and much more.

Here’s some additional tips my friends at Microsoft shared with me about how to use Office 365:

5 Tips for Travel with Office 365 Home Premium and OneNote:

· Reference Your Notes: Once all your research and planning details arein OneNote, it’s easy to recall a particular detail at any given moment. Use Instant Search in the bar on the top right to recall anything you’ve ever put in OneNote.

· Turn Online Research into Plans: Clip and save information from the web with the “Send to OneNote” tool. As you make reservations, clip screenshots and send web pages or entire documents directly to sections of your notebook, no printer needed! You can also scan into OneNote critical information that you might need on your trip, such as passports, medication labels or immunization records. This will ensure they are available even if the originals are lost or stolen.

· Move With Your Notes On-the-Go: Save your notebook to SkyDrive, and access it on your mobile phone or in the browser with the OneNote Web App. Once in the cloud, you’ll be able to access your information across your favorite devices — including your Windows PC, tablet, or Windows Phone. Windows 8 tablets are the perfect travel companion for travelers to check their plans and itineraries from wherever they are. There are plenty of Windows 8 PCs to choose from to make sure you’re getting the one that works for you.

· Let Excel & OneNote Work Together for You: With OneNote 2013, you can create and import an Excelvacation budget spreadsheet right into your notebook. What’s better is that when you edit that spreadsheet in OneNote, it will update the original Excel spreadsheet at the same time. It also supports formatting for data sorting, cell shading and header rows within table cells so you can make your information both beautiful and functional.

· Collaborate with Family & Friends via SkyDrive: Give your friends and family access to your travel notebook on SkyDrive so they can add their own travel tips or advise, and keep track of your itinerary. You can even see where others make changes and revisions throughout your notebook with OneNote 2013 identity profiles. Each authors’ initials are marked next to their work for better collaboration!

Microsoft actually just launched a new special-edition OneNote travel notebook last week in collaboration with Travel + Leisure to make travel planning easier and more fun with summer vacation season right around the corner. As I live on an airplane – usually for work and very rarely for play — I’m obsessed. The customizable notebook is packed with expert advice from the editors of Travel + Leisure, activities and foods to try, handy packing lists for all kinds of weather and more; all you have to do is plug and play!

So, the timing is just about perfect to be excited.

Giveaway: I’m giving away a one-year subscription to Office 365 Home Premium (a $99.99 value). To enter to win, make sure you are following @AlyWalansky and @Office on Twitter, please RT this giveaway, and then tweet us #OfficeTravels saying why this Office365 subscription would make YOUR life easier this summer. Deadline to enter is June 5. Good luck!